Tuesday, February 14, 2012



Today at Focal Point I taught a class with the nebulous meaning title of Contemporary Photography Techniques. If you consider that the teacher’s only digital camera is a 3G iPhone you can understand that contemporary might be a muddled name. I do shoot film. I do shoot b+w and “worst” of all my post (as the contemporary lingo dictates) is in a wet darkroom.

But I firmly believe that because the stress of my courses is always to lighting and composition and that I have a good grounding in colour correction, subtle (I have to beat on my own drum) manipulation of digital corrective techniques and a pretty good idea of the workings and the usefulness of custom white balance, my students will not leave disappointed.

If anything I am the disappointed one. Perhaps frustrated would be a better word for it. Today’s model was Mihola Terzic of Estonian extraction. It seems that I have met a couple of equally striking Estonians in my past as shown here and here. I commented that if Terzic and Leonard Cohen would find themselves together in a locked room they would probably commit a sympathetic suicide pact. At this point she flashed her first smile. When I mentioned The Hunger she flashed another. And when I began to sing the first words of Bauhaus’s Bella Lugosi’s Dead, “Undead, undead, undead…” I knew she was ours for the rest of the evening.




As a teacher I managed to squeeze two shots with my Tri-X loaded Nikon F-3. I can only express my frustration of what I could have done, all on my own, had I been one of my students. Damn!